Despite changes, Wikipedia will still “fail within 5 years”

A law professor has been arguing for years that Wikipedia will "fail" by the …

We've got to give law professor Eric Goldman credit: the man sticks with his predictions. On December 5, 2005, he made the startling claim that Wikipedia would "fail within five years." On December 5, 2006, Goldman doubled down on his prediction, saying that Wikipedia "will fail in four years." On December 5, 2007, Goldman took to his blog once more in order to give Wikipedia three more years write about eBay.

All of which brings us to now, when Goldman has at last doffed his sandwich board of apocalyptic doom, exchanging it for an academic paper in which that doom is parceled out in Latinate diction and footnotes. Called "Wikipedia's Labor Squeeze and its Consequences," Goldman's paper conspicuously avoids both timelines and the charged rhetoric of "failure."

"I found that predicting Wikipedia's 'failure' produced very emotional responses that overwhelmed consideration of my argument's merits," he noted in a blog entry last week. "I still think my 2005 predictions look pretty good (using my self-selected definition of 'failure'), but I deliberately directed the article towards the 'why' rather than the 'when.'" (Or, as he told Ars this week, "I toned down some of the most inflammatory turns of phrases.")

But do his criticisms hold up in light of major changes being made by Wikipedia over the last few weeks?

In addition, Wikipedia will roll out an optional feature later this year called WikiTrust. It's a tool that color codes the text on article pages based on the reputation of the person who made each particular edit, and it's meant to give readers a sense of which statements are settled and which have the potential to be controversial, slanted, or just plain wrong.

But it's Goldman's view that these are only first steps. Flagged revisions are a sign that Wikipedia is growing up, but it's also a move away from the original site ethos that allowed anyone in the world to edit any item in any article. That free editability has given way over the years to various limits (including "protection" and "semi-protection" of pages), thanks to repeated high-profile incidents of vandalism and inaccuracy.

As the site became popular, it was soon a magnet for both vandals and spammers. The protection measures meant to ensure site integrity in the face of such attacks also throw up a higher barrier to entry for new Wikipedia contributors. Most editing work on the site is already done by a small cadre of volunteer editors, but as they leave the project, it may be increasingly difficult to replace them thanks to the barriers to entry and the xenophobic bent of Wikipedia insiders.

Without offering anything to the editors who put so much time into the site beyond some very modest digital awards (barnstars, recognition within a tiny community, etc.), the prospect of devoting such effort to Wikipedia may be unappealing to newcomers, especially as the excitement of "colonizing the frontier" has ended and Wikipedia turns its efforts to cleanup, maintenance, and gradual expansion. This is the "labor squeeze" the Goldman worries about in his paper.

What's the end game for the site, then? On his blog last week, Goldman went further than his paper did, suggesting that "Wikipedia eventually will deploy Flagged Revisions, or some other stringent form of editorial lock-down, across the entire site, not just for living people's biographies... Substantial restrictions to user editability are Wikipedia's only viable long-term solution to preserve site credibility."

But the preservation of credibility this way comes at a huge cost. First, it means that Wikipedia has failed—at least when it comes to the original utopian idea of an encyclopedia that anyone, anywhere can edit at anytime. Those days are behind us, says Goldman; that might not be a bad thing, but it does mean that Wikipedia's core talent pool now needs to solve the labor problem by finding new ways to reward those who donate so much time to the site—and do a better job welcoming newcomers.